How the Media Broke the Immigration Debate

On 7 January, Mark Zuckerberg posted a video message on Instagram, in which he announced that Meta would “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” This was an abrupt about-face from the CEO of a company that once employed thousands of content moderators. But who decides what constitutes “mainstream discourse” on controversial topics like immigration? For decades, as Zuckerberg notes, the answer has been the “legacy media.” Over the course of a generation, a small number of progressive editors, journalists, and activists have muddied the language and context of the topic, aggravating one of the country’s most persistent political problems.

“Terms like ‘undocumented’ and ‘unauthorized’ can make a person’s illegal presence in the country appear to be a matter of minor paperwork,” wrote Tom Kent, the Associated Press (AP)’s deputy editor for standards and production in 2012. Kent was responding to a policy proposal to eliminate the adjective “illegal” due to its perceived pejorative nature. Six months later, Kent’s guidance was overruled. The New York Times followed suit within a month. Ten years on, after a historic surge in illegal immigration that overwhelmed federal agencies and major cities, many publishers don’t even mention legal status when discussing immigration. So, how did we get here?

Back in 1986, when Reagan signed “comprehensive immigration reform” into law, the press used “illegal immigrant” and occasionally “undocumented” and continued to do so until the early 2000s. Some used the terms interchangeably, like then-junior senator from Chicago, Barack Obama, who mixed both in his floor statement to Congress on immigration reform in 2006. Two years later, as president, he appointed Sonia Sotomayor, the country’s first Latina justice, to the Supreme Court.

In her first opinion for the court, in the case of Mohawk Industries v. Carpenter, Sotomayor used the term “undocumented immigrant” for the first time in a legal context. The term “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” had appeared in more than a dozen decisions up until that point and many federal immigration statutes still bear the term. Explaining her choice of words in a subsequent interview with the Yale Law Journal, Sotomayor said:

Many of these people are people I know, and they’re no different than the people I grew up with or who share my life. And they’re human beings with a serious legal problem, but the word “illegal” alien made them sound like those other kinds of criminals. And I think people then paint those individuals as something less than worthy human beings. And it changes the conversation when you recognize that this is a different—it’s a regulatory problem. We’ve criminalized a lot of it, but it started as, and fundamentally remains, a regulatory problem, not a criminal one.

Sotomayor’s use of “undocumented” seeded broader shifts in public discourse, and by the early 2010s, many cable-news outlets had already adopted the term.

But in the world of print journalism, the AP and the New York Times had not. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and activist Jose Antonio Vargas set out to change that. Sent to the US illegally from the Philippines by his mother at the age of twelve, Vargas decided to publish his own immigration story in an effort to raise awareness about the millions of other Americans in a similar position. Having revealed his status, he became a vocal supporter of the DREAM Act and began a campaign to pressure the AP and the Times to abandon their use of the term “illegal” in their immigration reporting.

The AP has long been considered the gold standard of objective journalism. As a wire service, its content is used by local and national news outlets across the country, amplifying its reach and impact. The New York Times was famously characterised by librarians in 1913 as “the paper of record” and has been widely considered a reliable archive of significant events ever since. Its editorial decisions can move markets, sentiment, politics, and perception more than any other media entity. This unparalleled influence has given these two media giants the power to shape the language of immigration—language that has increasingly ignored broader public sentiment.

The AP did not immediately agree to change its terminology on immigration. Continuing his explanation of the current AP Stylebook guidance, Kent dismissed concerns about the allegedly pejorative nature of the term “illegal immigrant,” writing, “We don’t read the term this way. We refer routinely to illegal loggers, illegal miners, illegal vendors and so forth. Our language simply means that a person is logging, mining, selling, etc., in violation of the law—just as illegal immigrants have immigrated in violation of the law.”

Kent’s review was met with some derision, including from Daniel Kowalski, an immigration lawyer and AP customer who penned a response titled “Call Them ‘Unauthorized’” for the Huffington Post. In a separate editorial response to Kent, he wrote:

[R]egarding the “offense to dignity,” AP takes a superficial, even flippant approach. Brushing the issue aside by saying, “we don’t read the term this way,” AP ignores the very real and very visceral ways in which many readers and listeners react to the term “illegal immigrant.”

Six months later, senior vice president and executive editor Kathleen Carroll approved the policy change. Within weeks, Vargas and a group of activists staged a protest in front of the New York Times building and delivered a petition with more than 70,000 signatures to editor Jill Abramson demanding the paper stop using the term. Abramson updated the company’s guidance that afternoon: the Times would not stop using the term “illegal immigrant” entirely, but reporters and editors would be encouraged to “consider alternatives.”

The AP and the Times may have settled on the semantics, but among the public, the debate raged on. Neither organisation appeared to have consulted opposing interest groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) or the Heritage Foundation, and the quarrel about language became a cleavage point in public opinion. But as far as the official record was concerned, the conversation was over.

By the mid 2010s, the mainstream media had overwhelmingly adopted the term “undocumented” (with the notable exception of Fox News). Human Resources departments introduced sensitivity-training sessions that discouraged or prohibited use of the term “illegal immigrant” in the workplace. Opponents of unlawful immigration found that their view was now tacitly associated with outdated and even racist attitudes and that they had lost the vocabulary they had previously used to defend their position. In 2015, 52 percent of Americans rated immigration as the most important issue facing the Obama administration, revealing a widening chasm between public sentiment and media representation.

In 2016, Donald Trump strode into this already fraught political and media debate. He claimed that most illegal immigrants are rapists and drug dealers and made grand promises to arrest the influx by building a wall along the Mexican border. Following Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat in that November’s presidential election, Trump’s opponents in and out of the news media coalesced into what they called “the resistance” in an attempt to thwart his policies. Some journalists began to argue that the concept of objectivity in journalism was outdated, and the field entered an explicitly activist phase.

In May 2018, Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy began separating illegal migrant children from their families. Citizens, activists, journalists, and politicians responded with revulsion and outrage, sharing harrowing stories on social media of “kids in cages.” In this feverish atmosphere, government officials, activists, and even outlets like The Hill shared images of children in detention facilities. It later emerged that the pictures were, in fact, published by the Associated Press in 2014, during the Obama presidency. The AP, Business Insider, Fox News, and Politifact corrected the record, but by then, the damage had been done. A few weeks later, the New York Times published an editorial titled “When Did Caging Kids Become the Art of the Deal?” and Trump rescinded his order two days later.

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By 2019, much of the press declared that the crisis was over. Following Biden’s election, the phenomenon of “kids in cages” was redescribed as “unaccompanied minors” in “migrant holding facilities.” The Times published a report showing that apprehensions were now at a fifty-year low. A month later, the same paper reported that border crossings were “already down”—which was technically correct but directionally misleading (they would increase by twenty percent that month alone and more than double by May). The Migration Policy Institute confidently declared that “the era of mass illegal immigration from Mexico is over.” Vox introduced an even vaguer and clumsier euphemism into the lexicon, “people coming into the US without papers,” which only deepened the semantic obfuscation.

By the following election season, many news publishers didn’t even bother to distinguish between migrants’ legal or illegal status at all. On 18 June 2024—six years to the date after the editorial board published its “Caging Kids” article—the Times described Biden’s new protections for “undocumented spouses” as one of the most significant immigration measures in years. Overnight, the paper would update the article with comment from three additional sources, all of whom approved of the change. The only opponent quoted was Trump advisor Stephen Miller, considered by many of his critics to be a white nationalist, who was said to have “seized” on the news. (The editors subsequently removed that characterisation without acknowledging the change.) 

However, the subscribers’ comments section, when sorted by reader picks, was a wall of angry frustration at the policy move. Social-media users swarmed on platforms like Facebook and X—now a platform for “unfettered” speech under Elon Musk—to vent their exasperation. No mention of the intensity of this sentiment appeared in the article, nor was there any mention of recent polls by CBS/YouGov and Pew showing majority support for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, a stunning milestone. The yawning chasm between public sentiment and media narrative was now as clear as day. Trump would go on to reclaim the presidency just five months later.

The “vibe shift” that Zuckerberg identified in his Instagram post had already been evident on X for some time. Discussions on the platform about immigration in the US and Europe have been constant, vociferous, and unfiltered, and they have often focused on the perennially taboo dynamics of religion, culture, history, race, and values in a way that legacy publishers have been at pains to avoid.

But it would be unwise to expect a careful deliberation of those taboos now. Trump’s impulsively chaotic approach to governance may yet drown out voices offering a practical solution to this problem. Instead, reporting will bombard us with emotive images of immigration officers arresting families at birthday parties, parents pleading from behind chain-link fences in hastily erected shelters, sobbing children being pulled away from stuffed animals and crayons, and so on. Polls will show plummeting support for immigration control and construction of the southern border wall will be stalled by legal challenges. Trump will only have until the 2026 midterms to make durable changes before Republicans are likely to lose control of the House of Representatives and the topic returns to its intractable default position in American national politics.

If these undesirable outcomes are to be avoided, news organisations will need to completely rethink their partisan coverage of the immigration debate and start covering its multifaceted complexities and challenges with a view to arriving at thoughtful solutions. There are at least four ways in which the media can bring some clarity to this discussion that will help policymakers and the public forge a consensus to address the problem.

First, readers are not just going to read what reporters write, they will also notice what is left out. And omissions can reveal a lot about what journalists want their readers to believe. Illegal immigration isn’t simply a problem when it arrives in front of the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and pretending that it is tells Americans in Texas and Colorado that their concerns are merely abstractions. Why is it that readers can find a detailed essay in the New York Times about the perils of crossing the Darién Gap, but they have to go to the comments section to understand how naturalised American citizens and foreign-born green-card holders feel about the issue?

Who are these people that Americans are being asked to welcome as their new neighbours and fellow citizens? What do immigrants believe? Do they support equal rights for men and women? Or gay rights? Or Second Amendment protections? Is the person griping on X that he has been replaced by lower-paid H1B visa-holders telling the truth? And if he is, are there many others like him? How many? Would his former employers care to explain their strategy? Americans deserve the facts that reporters decide to leave out, and if they don’t get them from the media, they will find them elsewhere. Confidence in journalism will only improve when journalists are willing to tell the whole story.

Second, demographic change has not sorted our politics neatly into racial, ethnic, or even existing political categories in the way that many commentators assumed and predicted. Exit polls reported that Trump won 46 percent of the Latino vote, 54 percent of Latino men, and made significant gains among black men and younger voters. Liz Cheney and her father both endorsed Biden. Gay Latinos favouring strict border controls supported Trump.

Publishers should therefore be more circumspect when adopting novel forms of self-identification and characterising the interests and preferences of groups based solely on their racial identity. Attempting to popularise the use of jargon like “Latinx” was never going to work because not everyone is who they claim to be or who others want them to be.

Third, social media does not provide a reliable picture of the country and its voters. If 70,000 people like an outrageous social media post, does this mean that most Americans agree? How many people can celebrate violence or criminality before they no longer qualify as a “fringe minority”? “Everybody” may be talking about a hot topic, but how many people does it actually affect?

Media organisations like the AP and the New York Times have the resources to provide valuable context, and society is less healthy and less self-aware when its discourse is defined by loud but not necessarily representative voices. American politics will be saner and more productive when voters are able to distinguish extremism from legitimate shifts in public sentiment.

Finally, the “misinformation” cottage industry that has materialised over the last ten years has been dealt a serious blow by Zuckerberg’s policy change. Americans don’t want to outsource the search for truth, particularly to partisan institutions they no longer trust. It ought to have been predictable that Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board would almost immediately collapse amid widespread derision.

Accelerating advancements in science and technology pose challenging questions about our nature and the nature of the world around us. The more we study and measure, the more we will uncover uncomfortable truths about ourselves and each other. Free people deserve the right to consider potentially disruptive information, particularly when it comes to immigration, an issue that impacts the shape and substance of our society.

All of which leaves a number of pressing questions: Must Americans welcome anyone who arrives on their shores? Is it fair for Americans to demand that newcomers follow their rules, however imperfect they may be? Is it fair to ask if newcomers share American values and our belief in a common future? And do we still have a common future at all?

That last question haunts many Americans caught off-guard by the dizzying pace of social, political, and technological change. Americans paying close attention to the news may well feel like the world is unravelling, and that the country is about to follow. After two decades of foreign conflict, underwriting allies’ defence, and bailing out banks, corporations, the government itself, and failed states in Latin America, it’s not unreasonable for Americans to be angry that their government seems to be preoccupied with helping everyone but them. Of course, the story of immigration is more complicated than that, which is why it’s more important than ever that the media endeavours to bring clarity to the conversation the public is actually having.

Ever alive to changing political winds, Mark Zuckerberg has made a pointed, if expedient, defence of freedom of speech. The First Amendment also prohibits abridging freedom of the press. But what good is a free press if it lacks the courage to ask difficult questions about our most important problems? To those Americans anxiously seeking reassurance that their country’s best days still lie ahead, journalism at its best provides an indispensable service—a rigorous and fearless study of the world that better prepares us to face the difficult decisions of the future. It’s time for journalists to renew their commitment to the challenge. We deserve nothing less.